Devoted to the unexpected details that help to make life in the city worth living

Monday, 29 September 2008

Opposite the British Museum, Great Russell Street WC1

Opposite the British Museum is a very unmemorable pair of hotel buildings by CF Hayward, built in 1889 and 1895. Hayward was sufficiently pleased with them to put his initials in terracotta on the gable of the earlier one.

The British Museum infected generations of Londoners with an enthusiasm for the exotic (E. Nesbit's children are always nipping in) and Hayward obviously got the bug. He decorated one of the bow windows with a Pharoah and the other with an Assyrian god with wings.